The children had a four-day honeymoon at Windsor, just as Albert and I had, and then on the 2nd of February they were back at Buckingham Palace for their departure for Berlin. It was the sort of winter day I have always most disliked, bitter cold, and the sky so low and dark it seems like twilight all day, and the day seems over before it has begun. Poor Vicky’s eyes were swollen with tears when she came into the Audience Room with Fritz to say goodbye to everyone; the children all sobbed dreadfully as she hugged them one by one, with a kiss and a whispered word for each. Alice clung to her pitifully, and even Baby cried, as if she understood that her big sister would not be there any more to play with her. I was trying very hard not to cry, for Vicky’s sake, but as Albert and I left the children and led the way down the Grand Staircase, I caught sight of his set, white face and my control left me. Tears poured down my cheeks, and as I embraced them both at the door I was unable to speak a word, and my darling child clung to me and wet my neck with her own tears before walking out to the carriage. I thought my heart would break as I watched that little, brave figure, all wrapped in white velour, walk out under the frozen sky and climb into the carriage. She was Princess Frederick now, and belonged to me no more. Fritz climbed up after her, and then Albert, who was to accompany them to Gravesend, followed without a backward glance for me. Theirs would be the hardest farewell, I knew, and I did not begrudge him the extra time with her. Fritz told me afterwards that he occupied himself with staring out of the window so that they could talk together in private.
It began to snow as the carriage turned out of the Palace gates. At Gravesend the Victoria and Albert, in which they were to sail to Antwerp, was waiting for them in a strange, white world, the snow falling on the grey water and on the shoulders and hats of the crowds waiting to see her off, the flowers they had thrown lying on the snowy cobbles. ‘Be good to her or we’ll have her back,’ a Cockney drayman shouted as she and Fritz went up the side. On the deck she laid her forehead against her father’s chest and her tears ran free as she whispered, ‘Beloved Papa!’ Albert came back in the gathering gloom of a bitter afternoon to Buckingham Palace and went straight up to his room to write to her: ‘I am not of a demonstrative nature and therefore you can hardly know how dear you have always been to me, and what a void you have left behind in my heart.’ She showed me the letter years later, and it almost broke my heart. The words were so desolate. If she left a great gap in my life, how much greater a gap in Albert’s? For at least now I had a woman correspondent, a married woman to whom I could say anything, without any of the awkward restraints of communication with an unmarried girl or with a man. Our correspondence has been of the greatest importance and comfort to me. We have been writing to each other now for almost forty-three years, often several times a week, and I don’t think there is a soul in the world I know better, or love more dearly.
Poor Vicky had a great deal to put up with in her new life. She was known contemptuously as die Engländerin, for Prussia was as anti-English as England was anti-German, and she was too straightforward to be able to hide her natural feeling that England was the best and most advanced country in the world. She and Fritz had no influence and almost no friends at the backward, intensely militaristic Court. Vicky was too clever for them, and Fritz too gentle; the men talked of nothing but manoeuvres and uniforms, and the women of clothes and parties. The King and Queen ignored and snubbed them. The apartments allotted them were damp and dirty, the stoves blocked by twenty years of soot, not a single lavatory or bathroom, and the kitchens so far away that the food was always cold.
Fritz’s uncle died in 1861, his father became King, and Fritz and Vicky became Crown Prince and Princess. Vicky used her new position to fight for women’s rights, including her own to be involved in politics, but it was an unequal struggle. Almost immediately, Fritz’s father did away with parliament and called for Bismarck, and Bismarck brought in repressive measures, including censoring the Press. Fritz, torn between his duty to his father and his duty to his liberal principles, came down on the side of the latter and made a speech condemning the move (Vicky supported him in this). Bismarck never forgave them, and spent the next twenty-five years using his considerable influence to discredit the Heir and his wife.
Albert had spent his last private time with Vicky in reminding her of her great purpose, to work with Fritz to bring about by peaceful means a united and liberal Germany, and she never ceased to work for it. But it was not to be. It was not until March of 1888 that Fritz’s reactionary father died, and Fritz became Emperor of Germany (as the title was by that time), and by then he was already fatally ill with cancer of the throat. His appalling suffering was made worse by the ineptitude of the German doctors (of whom I had never had any opinion, as I told Vicky roundly before she ever went to Prussia) and by the knowledge that his son and heir, Willy, had been seduced by the Junker party, by his grandparents, and by Bismarck. They together had set Willy against his own father and filled his mind with dangerous militaristic rubbish. Fritz was Emperor for only three short months, too little time to do anything, especially since the government and the ruling party had long since allied themselves with Willy. On June the 15th 1888 my poor darling Vicky became a widow, the Dowager Empress Frederick, and Willy became Kaiser Wilhelm II, and began polishing up his army and navy and antagonising everyone in Europe.
This has been the end of my beloved Albert’s dream. I can’t see Willy ever becoming the kind of liberal, improving ruler Albert would have wanted. Though he has his good qualities, and though I have always been fond of him (and I am the only person in the world, I think, that he minds in the least), he is all ate up with Prussian pride, and has always been the sort of boy who pulls off a fly’s legs and wings and thinks the fly don’t mind. Even at Bertie’s wedding, on his first visit to England, when he was only four years old, he showed his future character by throwing Baby’s muff out of the carriage window, and later during the service, though looking very sweet in Scotch dress, he picked the cairngorm out of the hilt of his dirk and flung it across the chapel with a shocking oath. When Affie and Arthur tried to restrain him he fought like a mad thing and bit their bare legs. Later when he was brought before me he addressed me impudently as ‘duck’ (where he had that from I can’t imagine) but I managed to keep my lips from twitching and quelled him with a look. From the first, I never spoiled him or allowed him to ‘get away with’ anything, which I think was what gave us our better understanding. But even I cannot control him when he is out of my presence, or influence him politically. I fear it will end badly.
17th November 1900
YESTERDAY I met a group of Colonial soldiers returning from South Africa, who are fine men with good, honest faces, though all of them sadly worn and many sick and injured. I made a little speech and then shook hands with them and spoke to them about their experiences. Even their chaplain, poor man, was injured: he had had his foot bitten off in the veldt by a mad horse, a perfectly dreadful fate!
I was very tired afterwards, but am feeling better today, and I told Reid quite sharply this morning that I will not be treated as an invalid. It is the worst thing for me to be petted and cosseted and kept indoors. I have had a pleasant drive out with the little Battenbergs, but it has turned very cold now, so that even I am glad to pull up to the good fire as I carry on with my writing.
With Vicky married, we turned our attention to Bertie. His tutor, Gibbs, had been chosen by Albert for his rectitude and learning, but their temperaments did not suit, and Gibbs had failed to make anything of Bertie, and the lack of sympathy between them was now verging on the improper. So it was decided to change the regime. Bertie was given his own establishment, at White Lodge in Richmond Park, and his Tutor was replaced by a Governor, Colonel Robert Bruce. Bertie was at the difficult age between boyhood and manhood, and Albert was terribly concerned that at such an influential period he made only the right friends. Albert’s greatest – though unspoken – fear was that Bertie would be led into sexual erro
r. He wanted him to remain as pure as he, Albert, had, until he could be married happily to an equally pure girl. Only in absolute moral rectitude could Bertie hope to find happiness, and fulfil his duties to the Crown of England.
I understood Albert’s anxieties – which, as I said, he never spelled out to me in so many words – in an indirect way. I had not the same obsessive fear, but certainly I wanted my boy to be good, and I worried acutely about what sort of King he would make. Suppose I were to die suddenly, this year or next? Bertie would hardly be fit to rule, and either Albert would do everything, which in his state of health would probably kill him, or Bertie would refuse to listen to any advice and do everything wrong and probably bring about a revolution and lose the Throne.
Three carefully chosen and irreproachable young men were introduced, under Bruce, as Bertie’s gentleman companions to set him an example, and Albert set out in a long memorandum exactly what was expected of our son. There was to be no lounging, lolling in armchairs, no placing himself in unbecoming attitudes with his hands in his pockets. There was to be no whistling, no talking slang, no horseplay, no practical jokes. Conversation was to be serious and improving – not idle gossip – and leisure activities should aim to expand and refine the Prince’s character – not cards or billiards, but music, sketching, looking at engravings, hearing plays or poetry read aloud, et cetera. Bruce was required to send frequent reports on Bertie’s behaviour and progress, and to keep an exact note of everyone he met and what they talked of. Bertie was not to leave the house without reporting to Bruce and obtaining permission.
The following year Bertie was sent to Oxford – which I did not at all envy him, for I have never liked the atmosphere of Oxford. There is something gloomy and monkish about the place. The Dean of Christ Church urgently requested that Bertie be allowed to live inside the college so as to be able to make friends of his own age, not realising that was the very thing Albert wanted to prevent. In a private house, living with his Governor, Bertie would be under much stricter supervision, and Bruce would be able to prevent him falling in with an undesirable set. So it was arranged; and when Bertie went to Cambridge for a spell in January 1861, the same restrictions applied. By that time even Colonel Bruce was pleading for more freedom for Bertie, and looking back, I suppose we did handle the business badly. Lord M. had warned me against watching a child too closely, and I have passed that same warning on to my own children about the upbringing of theirs. But at the time I was unable to see past Albert’s fears, born of the behaviour of his own father and brother; and my own worries about the Succession. There was so much at stake with Bertie that I can’t see how we could have tried less than everything to make sure it all came out right; and much less than everything was probably the only thing that would have improved him.
Bertie himself had expressed two wishes about his own life – that he should be allowed to enter the Army (which I said that of course he could not, as a profession, though he might spend some time in it in an unattached capacity), and that he should be allowed to travel abroad. So in November 1858 we allowed him to visit Vicky in Berlin for three weeks. Albert wrote warning her that she would find him improved in looks but interested in nothing but clothes – ‘Even when out shooting he is more occupied with his trousers than the game!’ – and asking her to make sure he had some mental occupation while he was there. Socially Bertie was a great success. Though short and rather knock-kneed (his son Georgie is too, I’m sorry to say) he was at that time quite nice looking, a fine dancer, and possessed of considerable charm. Vicky wrote, raving about him and saying how everyone had adored him.
In the summer of 1860 we sent him with Colonel Bruce on a tour of North America, where he was very successful. His welcome in Canada and the United States was wonderfully warm (surprisingly so in the case of the United States, which had rebelled so violently against Bertie’s great-grandpa!) and though the tour was supposed to be a private one, he did a great deal of good as an ambassador for England. It would be impossible to exaggerate, said Bruce, the enthusiasm of Bertie’s reception; the men approved him and the women were all in love with him, the newspapers thought him a fine manly fellow, and the whole tour had been one continual triumph.
Returning to the life of a scholar was difficult for Bertie after his success in America, and Bruce in one of his reports urged that an early marriage should be considered for him, before his charm and love of gaiety could get him into trouble. Albert and I had already begun thinking along those lines, but the choice of princess was difficult. He could not marry a Catholic, and had already stated firmly he would only marry for love (which I agreed with), but Albert’s first list of eligible Protestant princesses proved them to be very few and very plain. My own stipulations were that she should be reasonably good-looking, virtuous, and if possible have sufficient strength of character to influence Bertie for the good. After all, whoever she was, she would be Queen of England one day.
We asked Vicky to look about for someone suitable, but the only name she came up with was Princess Alexandra of Schleswig-Holstein, who though outstandingly beautiful was still in the schoolroom, and who, because of the complexity and bitterness of the Schleswig-Holstein question, was politically undesirable. (Palmerston in later years said only three people had ever understood the Schleswig-Holstein question. One was the Prince Consort, and he was dead. The second was a German professor, and he had gone mad. The third was Palmerston himself, and he had forgotten what it was! But the core of the problem as far as we were concerned was that both Denmark and Prussia claimed sovereignty over the Duchies. Alexandra’s father, the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, was also heir to the Throne of Denmark; but Albert, because of his plans for a united Germany, had always supported Prussia’s claim, which would have made an awkwardness if the Duke became Bertie’s ‘pa-in-law’.)
However, in the spring of 1861 we learned from Vicky that the Tsar was interested in Princess Alexandra for the Tsarevitch, and had gone so far as to obtain photographs of her to show to his son, which put us on our mettle. Vicky and Fritz met the girl in May, and wrote glowingly of her beauty, charm and goodness, and said it would be a tragedy if we let her slip through our fingers. Given Bertie’s susceptibility to the pretty women of the United States, and the plainness of the other possible candidates, Albert decided Bertie ought to be told about Alexandra and given a chance to view her. If he liked her, the marriage might be contemplated on condition that there were to be no political aspects to the match.
It was all arranged quite nicely and privately through Vicky – Bertie was to visit her and Fritz, and they were to make a trip to Speyer, where Alix (as her family called her) was to be brought by her parents. They all met ‘accidentally’ at the Cathedral on the 21st of September 1861, and when Bertie got back to Balmoral, he told me that he was quite pleased with the princess, her manners, her pretty face and her figure. Vicky, however, wrote rather crossly from Prussia that ‘Bertie was extremely pleased with Alix, but as for being in love, I don’t think he can be, or that he is capable of enthusiasm about anything in the world.’ And certainly Bertie never mentioned her afterwards, nor showed any eagerness to be married to her or to anyone. He even told me in conversation that the idea of becoming a father horrified him, which did not bode well for his or England’s future. (Where this attitude sprang from we were later to find out!)
Before that, though, in the spring of 1861 Bruce (by then General Bruce) had been with Bertie in Cambridge, and had urged Albert, in view of the success of the North American tour, to allow Bertie to taste a little of his other wish, to enter the Army. A ten-week course of training at the Curragh during the next Long Vacation, he said, would be very good experience for the Prince. Albert had gone down to Cambridge in March 1861 for a meeting with General Bruce, and it was decided that Bertie should undergo a concentrated course of training for every grade from ensign upwards, moving on every fortnight so that at the end of ten weeks, if he exerted himself, he would be competent to manoeuvr
e a brigade in the field. Strict supervision was to be exercised, however, to keep Bertie from mixing too much with other young officers. He was to give dinner parties twice a week to senior officers, dine twice a week in his own mess, once as a guest in some other regimental mess, and twice (including Sunday) quietly in his own house.
So Bertie had arrived at Kingstown on the 29th of June 1861, spent a few days at the castle, and then went on to the Curragh. Though he had worked hard, he had not the abilities to succeed in the ambitious training course that had been laid down for him, but he enjoyed himself very much. How much we were to discover in the most painful of circumstances, when we also learned that without locking him up, it is impossible to keep a young man bent on mischief out of it. At the very time he was being brought together with the virtuous Princess Alix for them to take stock of each other, Bertie was harbouring a hideous secret, the discovery of which was to have the most appalling consequences.
In 1860 Alice was seventeen, and stepped into the position of eldest daughter at home, which she very much enjoyed. Though quiet and thoughtful, she had a perfectly natural girl’s love of gaiety and balls and reviews, of dancing and spectacle and having compliments paid her and all eyes upon her as she entered a room. It was time to find her a husband. We toyed for a while with the idea of Prince William of Orange (grandson of the William whom Princess Charlotte had jilted in 1814, and son of the William who had been suggested for me without success in 1836 – not a very good omen!) but when he visited us with his brother we found him a very languid, dull sort of youth, and he and Alice did not fancy each other. When we discovered he already had a vicious reputation, we felt we were well rid of him. (In fact he never came to the throne, but died of his debaucheries in 1879 – fancy if we had given him our gentle Alice!) The next candidate was brought before our notice by Vicky, and Uncle Leopold, asked to investigate, gave him a very good report. He was Louis of Hesse, nephew and heir of the Grand Duke, twenty-three years old and intelligent, interested in politics and government – which recommended him to Albert – and of absolutely pure habits, though Uncle Leopold said he was not handsome. He and his brother-visited us in the summer of 1860, and I liked him very much, a gently spoken, frank, sensible young man who obviously admired Albert enormously and sought his opinion about the political situation in Europe in the prettiest way. He and Alice were in love almost on the instant. He visited us again in November, and at Christmas they became engaged.
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